Marvel Comics has a new EIC

Axel Alonso and Marvel have “mutually parted ways” with each other. The new Editor-in-Chief is C.B. Cebluski.

Is Quesada still in the management mix at Marvel?

He’s “Chief Creative Officer.” Your guess is as good as mine as to whether than means he’s actively engaged in the management of the company, or whether he’s been put somewhere to serve out his contract and not screw anything up.

I don’t know enough about Cebulski to have a strong opinion about him, but have heard good things and this seems likely to be positive news for Marvel Comic fans. I’m unsure how much of the blame Axel Alonso personally deserves, but his run has been an unprecedented disaster - the comics have been rendered largely unreadable through talent loss and misguided experimentation driven by reasons other than creative inspiration. It hasn’t been a total loss - some good characters and books have been created, but I’d rather they now had the chance to prosper under a new captain.

Also adds some additional colour to Brian Bendis’s departure last week – I wonder if he left because he wasn’t going to get the EIC spot, or if his departure signaled to Disney/Marvel execs that a change at EIC was needed - seems unlikely to have been unrelated, in any event.

Well ain’t this some shit?

The story was that back then, he had been planning to leave Marvel, but set up a writing career first — and Akira Yoshida was a fiction he created to get his first writing gig on Darkstalkers for Dreamwave and then Conan for Dark Horse. And it was from that gig that his fictional pseudonym was approached by another Marvel editor, quite unaware that Cebulski was Akira, and Cebulski found himself hired by his own company. And kept the lie going.

That seems about right, Cebulski has always come off as half-otaku. This pseudonym was given writing assignments that were consistent with a beginner writer. (Thor: Son Of Asgard, X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, Elektra: The Hand, Wolverine: Soultaker, X-Men: Kitty Pryde – Shadow & Flame, X-Men/Fantastic Four – all mini-series rather than main line books)

Not quite a scandal to me, but I guess some folks might get upset about a white guy using an asian-sounding pen name, because these are the times we are in. If so, I’d be curious about whether those same folks would get similarly worked up about Elizabeth Warren’s fake-amerinidian claims.

Elizabeth Warren was wrong to do what she did. So is this guy.

Elizabeth Warren’s claim at Harvard that she was a Native American was a bullshit move. She was wrong to do what she did, but she also was not teaching Native American Studies or lecturing as a Native American voice as far as I’m aware.

In contrast, “Akira Yoshida” was given titles like the Kitty Pryde and Wolverine books that supposedly leveraged his great insight into Japanese culture.

But really, his biggest faux pas was that CB was hired in 2002 at Marvel to attract Japanese talent to come work for Marvel.

I guess his biggest get was himself in yellowface.

If he hired himself, that would indeed be scummy. But the BC article says he was working for other publishers under that pseudonym when Marvel reached out to him. And that Marvel eventually figured it out.

There’s a tradition in writing for pseudonyms, but I did figure there would be a constituency for the “yellowface” claim. I don’t think I’m there myself, because I’m not crazy about the idea of forcing authors into a fixed identity under threat of mob justice. If a woman wants to write under a male pen name go for it, and vice versa. Same for an author who wants to avoid being stereotyped by a given name.

Sure. I get that. Writers have been using pen names for ages. I don’t really have an issue with that. My problem is that as an Asian American that had to tell classmates countless times that not all Asians knew karate or owned samurai swords, this idiot was perpetuating that kind of ignorant garbage in his writing. I look at the tripe this fool set to paper and it kills me. I know comics gonna comics, but damn.

Oh, and the cherry on the cake is a bunch of Marvel folks meeting a Japanese translator and assuming they had met this dude’s alter ego.

Fair enough. My heritage is such that if I ever get around to writing that book in my head, I would probably use a generic pen name to avoid the projections of exoticism that would be attached to my own legal name in the current climate. It’s a minefield out there in other people’s brains.

This false life story is perhaps the best example of why Cebulski’s secret pen name is controversial, and why those in the comics community are casting doubt on his new role as Marvel EiC. The tale of a young Japanese person with aspirations of writing for a big comics publisher in the U.S. is no doubt a common one, so by writing manga-inspired Marvel comics that include elements of Japanese culture himself, he effectively took the opportunity for work, money, and a career away from an actual Japanese writer.

That last sentence is pretty speculative, but consistent with modern pseudo-journalism.

No idea why the preview link has a giant half head pic. Or why my typing that last sentence seemed to fix it.

My bigger concern is that I didn’t like any of those books, to the extent I even remember him. Agree with Telefrog that this is an awful thing for Marvel to have done (representing nationality that wasn’t true) - and lines about his fantastic Godzilla collection, etc. are really cringe-worthy - at least it was stopped long ago, however, and while the use of the pseudonym was clearly his decision, what’s worse is the marketing of his background, and that seems to have been done by Jemas etc.